When comparing Codea vs GLBasic, the Slant community recommends GLBasic for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?”GLBasic is ranked 61st while Codea is ranked 95th. The most important reason people chose GLBasic is:

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Pros

Pro

Helpful code editor

Errors show up live, as you type. Smarter autocompletion picks up your local and global variables, including nested types. Everything else is just plain smarter, from indentation to highlighting.

Pro

Ships with music and sound packs

Codea ships with three great music and sound packs, composed just for Codea and free for you to use in whatever you create.

Pro

You can code on an iPad and easily distribute the game

Pro

Location library

Location library lets you make use of the GPS inside your iPad. Get your latitude, longitude, altitude and more with a dead-simple API designed specifically for Codea.

Pro

Easy to develop with

Language is easy to use, with a fast compiler.

Pro

Fast 2D

Pro

Easy to learn

Pro

Support

Forum support is great. No advertising in program or forums. Company has been going for over 10 years.

Pro

3D

Unlike most multi-platform development systems, 3D is available across most of them.

Pro

Multi-platform

Code can be written once and will work on supported platforms with very little modification.

Pro

No hidden fees

PC version is free.

Full Multi-platform version requires one-off very reasonable price, and all further updates are free, however you can run a watermarked demo on your chosen platform with the free demo version.

Pro

C/C++ support

C/C++ code can be included inline or as a DLL/.o/dylib file.

Pro

HTML 5 compiling is now faster and works better

Pro

Default GUI system works fine, and has all the needed widgets needed

Only problem is position is based on position of previous widget.

Pro

Compiler is fast and produces efficient code

Pro

Free for home development

Create apps for non commercial 2D programs running on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. The extension to create programs for other platforms, 3D or network applications requires a license key. Otherwise the "Premium" programs are limited to 10 min runtime for test purposes. There is no trial limit for the development environment.